


All That Awaits

by pointysticks (Lindra)



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:58:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lindra/pseuds/pointysticks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sephiroth wakes up in the Nibel Mountains two years after Advent Children sane, starving and prodded by unhelpfully cryptic Cetra holding a grudge.</p><p>Of course it's not going to be that easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That Awaits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kalloway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalloway/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Infinite Possibilities](https://archiveofourown.org/works/699297) by [Kalloway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalloway/pseuds/Kalloway). 



> This is my first fic for FVII. I'm heavily influenced by Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus. According to the FF Wikia's timeline, 0011 is two years after Advent Children and just after the events of DoC.
> 
> The title is part of a quote from LOVELESS.
> 
>  
> 
> _My friend, do you fly away now?_  
>  _To a world that abhors you and I?_  
>  _All that awaits you is a somber morrow_  
>  _No matter where the winds may blow_

Sephiroth spends too much time in the company of dead women.

It's a conclusion he comes to after he wakes up, half-drowned in snow and shivering, and bats away the poking fingers of a dead girl. "Stop that," he tells her.

She only laughs. He lost the right to tell her to do anything, anything at all, years ago.

Sephiroth drags himself to his feet. Most of his hair long gone from starvation, his clothes torn down to a pair of kneeless, inadequate trousers, but at least he has his boots. He doesn't know where he's going, and he doesn't know why, and he's too cold and hungry to quite care. Aerith will point the way to go, and he will go there until he drops. She will bother him awake, and he will follow her finger, and he will snatch what rest he can among the drifts hugging the mountains.

She waits until he's shivered off most of the melt before she points straight at the rock face, then up.

Sephiroth flexes his hands, sighs at the inhumane mischief in her eyes, and starts climbing.

One cruel goddess for another. So it goes.

His hands and chest have been torn to ribbons and he's tired enough that he's not so much trudging through the snow as slowly pushing through it, but at least he's finished climbing for the moment.

The Cetra frowns when he crumples pinking snow into a makeshift shelter and huddles there, but says nothing and fades.

Sephiroth sleeps, and he wakes to the pain of her touch and stumbles upright. He eats handfuls of snow, shivering, and his head and teeth ache from the chill. His tongue is almost permanently shoved against his soft palate these days, but it doesn't help as much as he would like. Not against this.

She points, and he wearily goes onwards and onwards. Sephiroth is never sure of the days, how long they are, if this is a true world or a hell. He almost never sees another living soul, and only in the long, long distance where they might as well be shadows.

The first town he sees in the distance when he looks up from his own feet, his clinging handholds, confuses him for a good kilometer until he can see the shapes of buildings and the waver of dark patches. A town. Houses. People.

"Shouldn't I avoid it?" Sephiroth tries not to question her, for fear that she will touch him in her whimsy, but this is unexpected, and too much. It is really too much.

She shakes her head and points down into the valley, at the town, her aim steady as a sniper's.

Sephiroth isn't sure what to expect when he comes close enough to be seen. The horror, he expects. The pity is something else quite altogether.

"My God," one murmurs. "My God. What happened to you?"

Sephiroth reaches to touch his face, unsure of what they're looking at for all this time he has never seen a reflection, but they pull his hands down with warning words. He would struggle, would resist, but he feels weak and the girl is watching him. Hurting them would anger her.

They give him food, and drink, and warmth, and he is so very confused and shaken that all he can do when they try to drag him inside someone's house is dig in his heels and collapse heavily. They cannot give him shelter. He is -- who he was. Is. They cannot give him this.

They put blankets over him and one woman kneels close, plucking at his skin. Barbs, he supposes. Thorns. He wonders at the clarity of her skin, and it is only when he is on the cusp of fainting from the heat of the blankets that he realises he is simply just that filthy.

He wakes in an unfamiliar place, with familiar green eyes watching him. He doesn't hurt, not the way her Cetra touch hurts, but he tenses all the same. Her gaze discomforts him but he welcomes it. This slip of a dead girl is all he recognises, though he looks about him restlessly. There are faces on the wall that he doesn't know, and hands have made the quilt he has never seen before, and he is strangely aware of the textured linen at his back. He is clean, he realises. Someone has washed him and put him to bed.

Sephiroth stares at her, mute with a kind of fear. He didn't want this for himself. He doesn't deserve this. He knows very well that he doesn't. He hasn't asked for it. Surely she knows that. Surely. Surely she realises.

He watches for her finger, her order, but her hands are lax in her lap. She is perched on a chair beside his bed, and Sephiroth is still cocooned like he shouldn't ever let himself be. He struggles upright. Even the air is warm inside this place. Warm and too close. The doors and windows and neat wooden trim disturb him.

He is dressed. They have washed him and tended his wounds and given him clothes, and Sephiroth would rather like to weep for their ignorance of just how undeserving he is of their kindness, the ignorance he must shatter. He deserves their revulsion and hatred. He does.

Aerith smiles and smooths the translucent skirt of her dress with translucent hands. He can see the dark cabinet through her shoulders, the knick-knacks carelessly clustered at one side.

"You were Jenova's vengeance," she says, her voice sweet. "Now you are penance."

Sephiroth doesn't understand.

"Live, Sephiroth." She gives commands so very well.

"I can't," he says. "I don't deserve --"

She stands. Such a short little thing, to destroy all his plans. Such a slender thing, to call the wrath of the Planet down upon him. "No, you don't." She smiles again. "Your life is a second chance. Unwanted, undeserved. You must live among your consequences. You must never escape them. You never will escape."

He retches desperately. "Please. I can go back to the mountains. I can go anywhere you want. Please."

Sephiroth would rather face a cliff five thousand metres high than do what she is asking him to do. Fifteen thousand metres, razored scree, naked and shoeless. Anything but this. Anything but people, the people he brought to suffer in his madness, his crazed glory.

Aerith tilts her head, dispassionate. "You will live a very long life, Sephiroth. It will never be enough, but ..." Her eyes brighten. "It will please us."

There is a knock on the door, and he whirls knowing the girl, the Cetra, is fading, leaving him to founder alone. No direction, no hope of atonement.

"You all right there?"

He swallows. This is a human. Deep wrinkles. Fifty, sixty years old. Injury to his right shoulder. Weak. Sephiroth could disable him easily and leave.

"Where am I?" he asks instead.

The human closes the door. Sephiroth considers his likely intentions. The human wouldn't be the first. Sephiroth would perhaps allow it after negotiation. "You don't recognise me, do you?"

Sephiroth stares at him. The Cetra did this on purpose. He's sure of it. They resurrected him and made him march through cold wilderness for how long and gave him to someone who knew him, all on purpose.

"I don't."

The human grins. "Not that I blame you, I wouldn't remember me either. I'm Zurik. I was Gast's lab assistant when you were little." He holds out a hand near his waist. "Very little." It illustrates nothing other than the fact that this man is from a time in his life that he generally avoids remembering. "Do you remember Professor Gast at all?"

Sephiroth nods. The first to teach him betrayal. How richly he deserves it for what he is. Yes, he remembers Gast. "If you were there, you know what I am," he says. There's a sort of lead in his chest. His resurrection isn't supposed to end so soon, is it? He likes breathing. He'd forgotten how much he likes breathing.

Zurik shakes his head. "Yeah, you're pretty unforgettable. But I don't give a shit about the world according to Hojo." He spits the name and rocks on his heels. "So I'm not going to do anything but serve up a pretty rocking breakfast, if I say so myself. Come out when you want." He leaves. "You were cuter when you were little," he mumbles on the other side of the door, close enough that Sephiroth can hear his sigh, the tread of his boots.

Sephiroth stares at the mismatched panels, speechless.

Breakfast.

The man says he was a lab assistant for Hojo's experiments, and he expects Sephiroth to join him for breakfast.

Will the Cetra strike him down if he leaves the house through the window? He considers the risks for a while, then cautiously follows his nose to the kitchen.

Eggs and sausage and bacon. Meat. Meat and eggs and meat. Sephiroth's mouth waters at the idea of protein. His muscles are too wasted for his liking.

It doesn't smell poisoned, but he might have been gone for so long that entire new classes of toxins have been developed. It wouldn't surprise him.

Sephiroth still doesn't know what year it is. But there's a newspaper. He points. "Recent?"

"Today's," Zurik says. "If you're this confused you must've messed up a lot of shit when you broke out this time."

He doesn't remember ever escaping the labs. He doesn't remember ever trying.

He doesn't remember any of these headlines, and he wouldn't.

Sephiroth was dead for two years this time.

Nibelheim was October. The first of October. The first death. The trooper threw him into the mako, and Jenova found him. Forced him to climb out of the pool and go where he was told. He'd plotted revenge, he knows that much. He'd been aware, and dead, and he'd plotted vengeance.

He'd fought Cloud again, and died again.

Now he is here, fragile and alive and newly sane, and it is 0011. August. The paper tells him very little. Unstable and broken mako reactors. Shinra. Lifestream. WRO. AVALANCHE.

Very little about the world has changed, it seems. Still in such a dire state. He wonders if anyone remembers him. Other than Zurik, watching him so closely it's familiar enough to settle Sephiroth's stance.

"I've missed quite a lot," he tells Zurik. He looks at the food on the table. "I missed salt."

The assistant laughs and fetches a shaker, sitting back down with a clumsy creak. "Yeah, it's you. You still ask the same."

"I wasn't asking," Sephiroth says, and sits as gracefully as he can manage when the chair threatens collapse if he so much as moves an inch.

Zurik snorts. "Sure you weren't."

He is twenty-five years old, barring the time spent in the Lifestream. He is a decorated veteran and Commander of Armies. He has slaughtered thousands in the name of Shinra and in theory saved millions. He was an extremely expensive experiment and a -- admittedly terrible -- friend.

He was once worth respect.

Once.

Sephiroth resigns himself to the knowledge that he has no right to correct whatever lingering impression allows Zurik to chide him like a malfunctioning card reader.

The breakfast is good. It's light outside, past dawn, and he can hear someone to the west doing laundry. Mundane. The world didn't end with his death and resurrection, and in a way he is glad.

In a way. It still feels like it should have ended long ago with Angeal's death, and Genesis, and ... and Genesis.

Is Genesis still alive after all this time? Sephiroth isn't sure he wants to know. It still stings that he was never able to find the words to explain just how little LOVELESS had anything to do with the reality of being a hero. Sephiroth knows heroism as days of mako showers and cold tables and sleeping on tile floors between tests. He knows it as flesh sticking to his boots and desperation and never understanding why people do this to each other. Heroism is just a word for inhumanity.

But Sephiroth never was human, or a person. He still isn't.

"Where is this?" he asks. He suspects he's in Corel, that the Cetra led him over and along the Nibel mountains.

"North Corel," Zurik answers. "Still dealing with the refugees, so food's pretty tight. Eat up."

Sephiroth frowns. "Refugees from?"

"Corel, mostly," Zurik says, with a little too much relish. "Reactor blew years and years ago. Terrorists. AVALANCHE, they say." He opens his hands. "Boom. Wiped off the map. Just convicts up there now, but it didn't stop people trying to escape Geostigma." He barks a laugh. "Poor bastards. Now they're all healed up and they don't want to be there anymore."

Sephiroth doesn't remember ever reading a report of the Corel reactor being unstable and aside from the times affected by Hojo's interference, he remembers everything. He does remember Geostigma, at least the little he failed to sense in Strife's body.

Zurik holds up his hands. "Hey, if you don't believe me, go take a look. Where were you, anyway? Passed out?" He laughs at his own joke. Sephiroth is a joke. Sephiroth doesn't ... pass out. Doesn't care. Doesn't do anything but kill. Any inkling that he could ever be anything like a person with needs is a joke.

The anger is familiar and cold in his stomach. Even here, Shinra propaganda reaches. Even an assistant who has seen him scream and bleed as an infant believes the lies. 

He knows why he was so eager to believe Jenova. He knows. It only made sense that all of this was for something. That it had to be for something. It made sense and the understanding in place of suspicion drove him mad. Sephiroth would rather avoid that happening again. Not that he knows what to do with any of the knowledge that wasn't knowledge was lies wasn't lies was truth was delusion was confusion.

He knows he can't take much more of this easy dismissal, and he finishes eating.

"Something like that. If I may use your bathroom."

"You're welcome," Zurik says. Sephiroth feels his eyes on him even through the bathroom door, and when he emerges, Zurik touches his arm and stares.

Sephiroth lets him. He's still not sure of his strength and he doesn't want to give Zurik a reason to report his return to anyone inconvenient. It would defeat the purpose of his altered appearance. The straggling locks of hair were too pathetic to keep. "Where are you going?"

"Corel," he says. "I'm taking a look."

"Crazy bastard." But Zurik lets him leave.

The Cetra also let him leave the house, and the wind is cold on his naked scalp. He feels vulnerable without his hair and though it's waiting in his borrowed backpack until he can burn it safely, it's not the same. It's not at all the same, but at least no-one seems to recognise him.

He'd looked a fright in the mirror. Blistered and cracked and starved. It reminded him of Wutai and his attempts to give Hojo all those unspoken things he'd tried to reach with those scalpels.

But it and his mismatched clothes anonymise him, and Sephiroth finds he rather likes the lack of fear. Frightening these people would be counterproductive, particularly as it didn't seem many of them could flee even if they did know to fear him. 

Zurik wasn't exaggerating the numbers of refugees, the town's slow adjustment. All the houses are bordered by rusty corrugated iron in thin alleys and patched tents in overgrown gardens smelling too strongly of manure. Bored children with dirty knees are sprawled on every freshly-built porch.

Sephiroth wishes his time in the Lifestream could have helped with things like fathoming why civilian children never have anything to do. Every time he sees them they're staring at him or bothering one another and doing not very much at all useful or productive. It's senseless in a very civilian way to let children be so unruly precisely when they're best able to be taught the things they need to learn.

Manners, too. Sephiroth turns and looks at the pack of them tagging after him, and they freeze then scatter behind trees and bushes as though they're playing a game. He sighs.

"I'm busy," he announces, and he turns around and hopes that will be enough. Even the most stubborn of them stops following him when he reaches the outskirts of the town. For the first few hours his step is wary, cautious of being knocked back into by the Cetra, but nothing happens and nothing continues to happen.

He eats a rat raw, licking blood from his fingers, and considers the road. It's in worse repair than he expected. Nowhere near as bad as the mountains, but terrible for a public road to a reactor as large as Corel's. (As large as Corel's was. He really needs to track these things.)

A truck passes, shoddily maintained, and the driver studiously avoids looking at him. Sephiroth's fine with that, and he gets to his feet and continues on.

It's more than likely that he'll be able to salvage what he needs from the remains of Corel. The fewer people there to watch the reactor, the better for his purposes.

As for what it is precisely that he needs -- that he hasn't decided yet. It's clear that the Cetra want him to do something, but whatever it is, he can hardly accomplish it without tools. Do they want him to hunt down Jenova's remains and obliterate them from the face of this human planet? Does he want to hunt her down and ride the heavens as her child?

He yearns to kill all these useless mongrels and be wanted and worthy at last, to reach his pinnacle and have it be enough for somebody, but it's the same wistfulness he associates with the idea of ever punching Hojo. He never will. He knows he never will.

Sephiroth slept year after year, drifting in the Lifestream, and he's still so tired.

He wakes, shoves aside the branches he'd pulled over himself for shelter and concealment, and continues on. The inside of his head is very empty and very cold. Empty of orders and goddesses and direction.

He runs without really thinking about it, watching the landscape flow past. Corel is a smear, spreading black like a thumbprint, and soot crawls up the mountains cradling the town.

Sephiroth remembers flames and madness and continues on. There is a guard, with a wrap on his head and a loosely held bayonet, and Sephiroth lifts his hands in a gesture of false vulnerability and tells the truth. "I know a little medicine. Anything you're still having trouble with after Geostigma's cure is going to need someone with experience."

Field, at least. But patching up SOLDIERS was the equivalent of surgery on civilians. It took so much to injure SOLDIERS and Sephiroth was quite good at repairing compounded damage even without materia. Or he had been. Once. He thought perhaps he still could be.

Offering medical assistance keeps them from trying to shoot him. A superior returns with another guard and they see his eyes and ask if he is SOLDIER.

"I was. A while ago. I wasn't fond of the way things were run." He shrugs and waits.

They confer for a few too-short minutes. They ask him if he's a doctor. He represses the shudder and says he isn't. They confer again and let him in.

Sephiroth knows he'll never understand why they would do such a thing. It's so monumentally idiotic. He thanks them all the same because it's expected of him, and they lead him to what passes for their medical tent.

He's seen better containment in Wutai. In the middle of monsoon rainstorms. In a swamp.

But these are civilians. They wouldn't be expected to know. He reminds himself not to expect it, and he reminds himself that they've done well enough considering their head doctor is barely qualified at all. She confides she has only a semester of first aid. It could be worse.

He breathes in the stench of infection and despair and sets able-bodied to stripping bandages out of torn clothing and sends others to ransack abandoned houses for salt and vinegar and various condiments. Wutai taught him many things, not least the limitations of field treatment.

By the end of the day three have died and twelve will, even should the predictable complications occur, survive. More trickle in, helped in by family and neighbours, pulled in carts and barrows, as the news of his presence spreads. Apparently there was a riot.

Sephiroth splints bones and wraps wounds and tries not to touch the bare top of his head too much. He doesn't dare shade his eyes at all for fear of being recognised; once he'd tried to disguise himself and he was discovered at a distance by the Silver Elite purely by the angle of his cheekbones. The flatter he can make his face look, the better, and he decides that at least one of the abandoned houses must have cosmetics.

He thinks about what he'll make himself look like while he picks rocks out of a teenage civilian's shoulder with tweezers and scalpel. Broader and shorter, maybe. His features are narrow enough to be memorable on their own. Sephiroth never likes thinking of the stubborn engineering behind his creation but if he can shape his chin somehow, create the illusion of being tall and ugly enough to be ... well, not unremarkable, he's not sure he's capable of that, but easier to forget.

Sephiroth wonders what he would have looked like if Jenova wasn't his mother, if her cells and mako flooding hadn't overwritten so much of his genetic code. Less like this monstrosity? Like Hojo?

In a way it satisfies him to know Hojo was never capable of compassion for any being, no matter how closely related. It means even less of it was his fault or really had anything to do with him, and it helps a little.

Comfort has nothing to do with penance. He works steadily through the night. Fully half of the civllians can't left be unattended and Sephiroth is -- was -- long used to sleeping perhaps twenty hours a week. 

The townspeople give him warier looks when they find him calming a woman's fever the way he has decided he must do every half hour on the hour. He's always had very cold hands, and even unconscious and whimpering delirious she leans eagerly into his palms.

"Her fever will break soon," he tells the woman who let him inside -- the sheriff, and also the current prison manager. The prison is squat and sprawling in its rock faces, the town barely a collection of ruins and ghost-eyed townsfolk. But eight years is still not long enough for there to be nothing salvageable for his purposes.

She grunts. "Let me know when she's healed up and we'll put her back in."

Ah. He's been treating a prisoner, and he studies her matted hair and broken fingernails. "What was her crime?"

The sheriff shrugs. "Don't remember anymore. Been here for years. Tried to escape, the silly bitch."

Sephiroth says nothing. A flushed cheek shudders against his hand.

Two weeks later he is finished with all he can treat, and he is laden with a pack sturdier and fuller than the first. He'll avoid the desert; there's nothing for him there. The Gold Saucer he doesn't particularly like either.

He's decided to go to Costa Del Sol. Corel and its prison don't have anything more to tell him.

Three weeks, most of them spent swimming or running along the coastline between Corel and the outcropping housing Costa Del Sol, and his hair is already becoming enough of a fuzz that he has to stop to shave it again. The need for maintenance irritates him. But he's better with the cosmetics now, practicing in shallows and tucking his feet beneath chilly piles of sand with the scrap of mirror balanced on his knee, and he thinks it'll be good enough for a short while.

It's good enough for about three minutes.

That fucking cat. That fucking pet project.

Sephiroth turns at the mechanical whirr and stares it down.

"Come with me!" it chirps.

Sephiroth considers the situation, then follows. He's eaten and slept enough that he's not weak anymore, and he's quite confident that whatever guard Reeve might or might not have, he can easily break their defenses if needed.

Reeve's ... toyasaurus ... leads him to a low hotel off the beach, and into a room empty of guards and weapons. It's not precisely what he expects.

"It is you, isn't it?" Reeve says. He's aged. Everything and everyone is older now. "Sephiroth."

He shrugs. "Does that name really matter anymore?" It feels wrong these days. A name for a monster with a skin he wishes he could shed.

Reeve smiles and Sephiroth remembers why he ever tolerated his presence on the board of directors to begin with. He'd never been smiled at that way before Reeve introduced himself the first time, and it'd startled him into smiling back. He hadn't known he could until he felt the tug on his cheeks. Social reflex.

Usually developed in infants less than three months old, first seen in Sephiroth at the age of thirteen. 

He does in a way owe Reeve. Sephiroth was never friends with him, but their work was often related, physically and conceptually speaking, and it did help. Not that seeing him now helps anything. It only reminds him that he has no idea what he's precisely meant to do with the torment granted him.

Reeve is standing so very still, and Sephiroth rubs his bare scalp again. It's the sort of uncomfortable motion a SOLDIER, a Sephiroth, wouldn't ever make, and he tells himself that he will simply have to learn how to cross that distance. If he must start with this, then he must.

Reeve interrupts him. "Are you all right?"

He freezes. Why would he even ask that? "That's a ridiculous question." Sephiroth shakes his head. "You should be afraid of me."

"I know you're sane," Reeve says. "If you weren't, I'd already be dead. Me and Cait both. You'd still have your hair. Have a seat?"

Sephiroth sits, sliding his pack down his shoulder to lean against his knee. He's not above fleeing if he has to; it is only fools who hold ground they haven't secured, and this entire situation is a tarpit.

Reeve cracks first. He always has, and he rubs his fingers over his mouth. "I don't suppose you've heard, but I run the WRO restructuring Shinra as a better organisation. To help and protect and maintain the health of the planet."

He waits Reeve out.

"I'm still in the middle of it all, and ... look, do you want a job? You knew Shinra like the back of your hand. If anyone could help me get the WRO up and running properly in Shinra's ashes, it'd be you."

"I will not work for Shinra." He isn't sure he's actually said it out loud until he sees Reeve's eyes widen, and when he realises he feels almost giddy. Light. He doesn't have to go back there. He doesn't have to go back ever again.

Oh, Gaia, he doesn't have to go back, and he gets a hold of himself. The Cetra might give the order. There is that. But it's still the first time he's felt happy about anything in a decade, and he likes the lingering taste of relief.

It's sweet. It tastes like he imagines drunkenness might feel.

Reeve sighs. "It's not -- oh, blast. Would you be willing to accept a contract position? Working for me, personally."

"No," Sephiroth says. For him there is no distinction and never was any distinction. The interplay between Hojo's departmental authority, the President's, SOLDIER and the general army made that much very clear to him in his time at Shinra. There is no such thing as a morally neutral contractor. Morals. Sephiroth likes the idea of having morals.

"Then at least don't disappear. Let me give you a PHS. If you need anything. You wouldn't begrudge answering a few questions, would you?"

"Suppose I did answer your questions." Sephiroth regards the black case Reeve sets on the table with a certain distrust. The idea of being watched again chafes as much as it appeals. Oh, Reeve will deny it if Sephiroth ever asks -- but if he agrees, he'll be tracked wherever he goes. "Suppose I took that. How long before the Turks get involved?"

Reeve winces. "They don't exist anymore. Tseng is still around," Reeve says instead of trying to defend himself, and Sephiroth appreciates the honesty at the very least. Being lied to by amateurs is tiresome. "My bodyguard. He's good at it. You're not going to kill me," Reeve says, like it means something.

Who knows? It might even be true. Sephiroth carefully shades threat into his voice. It takes so little. Reeve is skittish already. "Perhaps not. It depends on your exact plans now that you are aware of me."

"I'm too busy to track down rogue SOLDIERs with too much time on their hands," Reeve says, the skin around his eyes craggy. "Really, I am. The transition period's been difficult. If anything, I'll be asking you about the filing systems the others used. Mine makes sense, I know it does. Theirs -- I know you liased with almost all the departments, that was your job. How the hell did you keep track?"

Sephiroth relaxes a little. He knows that tone. It's the same one Angeal had when he tried to help Sephiroth with paperwork and discovered that Scarlett, Palmer, Heidigger and the President had entirely different organisational preferences.

"I had a cheat sheet," he says, and because he is alive again and because morals are deliciously fresh and he does owe Reeve: "Do you have paper?"

Sephiroth likes having a pen in his hand again. He missed writing, in the Lifestream. All his thoughts were so ephemeral otherwise. A habit born of too much time with Hojo, he supposes. That man documented everything worth more than vague interest and forgot everything else.

He sketches out standard arrangements and category orders, aware of Reeve reading over his shoulder. It always bothered Genesis to have someone standing over him, watching what he did, but Sephiroth was so used to it that when tired he sometimes caught himself turning back to an imaginary lab assistant or tutor at his shoulder.

Reeve is right, now that Sephiroth considers it. This was his job. Lazard as Director handled different functions to Sephiroth. Fewer responsibilities. 

It was the legacy of Lazard's predecessor, who'd assumed being Director focused much more on budgetary issues and internal scheduling and let Sephiroth handle the rest. The rest generally involved knowing the names and families of every secretary serving the upper echelons of every department within Shinra. His life was much easier once he figured out that secretaries were the keystones of power and polite conversation with one for five minutes could ease months-long problems like they never existed at all.

He writes out the Weapons Development organisational system next and realises that he almost misses Scarlett. 

Shinra never liked the indispensability of SOLDIERs, was forever trying to force Scarlett to invent weaponry that could compensate for one, or five, or ten SOLDIERs so they could be assigned somewhere the company deemed more appropriate. 

Part of the problem was reputation, the public perception that SOLDIERs were horrifyingly fearsome and simultaneously the best solution to any problem involving force. In this arena they were allies; Sephiroth hadn't liked the inefficiency of being forced to deploy and redeploy his SOLDIERs any better than she liked public failures.

Scarlett was always very honest with Sephiroth when it came to the limitations she was working with and the fact that Hojo's alterations came closer to magic than any kind of technology she could reproduce. But she had tried. He was someone who could appreciate effort, no matter how foreign it was to him.

"My God, that's obscure." Reeve sounds almost like he admires the system, ruthless and difficult like its maker. "Madness. No wonder we couldn't find anything."

"Whatever you're after --"

"What?" Reeve startles, bristling like a cat. "We just couldn't figure out how to start."

Sephiroth doesn't appreciate being interrupted or treated like a fool, and Reeve has just done both. "Whatever it is, it'll be referenced in there. Most initial research went through Scarlett's hands. Even yours."

"If I was Shinra, I'd say you know too much," Reeve says. His voice is flat and careful in a way that makes the air over Sephiroth's knuckles feel very tight. "But this is the WRO. We're different."

He smirks. It feels wrong on his face, too much an echo of what he never will be again, but it's right for what he wants to say and he presses on. "You can't kill me, Reeve. I've died ... twice now? Three times? I don't recall. They were much, much stronger than you." He glances about at the shabby room. "Or your organisation."

Reeve looks ... sad. "Seeing you the way you were before we thought you were finally dead -- it wasn't easy. I hoped you might've got some peace at least. But you didn't, did you?"

"Did you really expect that?" This is an entirely irrelevant tangent, and Sephiroth picks up the case. He'd like to leave now. "I'll answer."

It's the best he can give since he still doesn't know what he's supposed to do with his renewed circumstances. Reeve can complain about not being Shinra anymore as much as he likes, but Sephiroth always was the first point of call when things went to hell, and things always go to hell.

"Take care of yourself," Reeve says. "It's nice to see you sane."

Sephiroth looks back at him. "Don't fool yourself. I'm still a monster."

Leaving is easy as he expects. The most he gets is a sensation of being watched prickling over his side when he browses in the market, and no-one interferes when he finds a cave along the coast some miles from Costa De Sol and eats there. He thinks over his situation.

From Costa Del Sol, he could go north to Bone Village and attempt to settle there. Make gil, integrate himself, fix whatever needed fixing. He could go anywhere he wanted. Kalm. Does Kalm exist? He isn't sure what exists and what doesn't. Midgar looked -- ruined, abandoned, when his copy summoned him on the outskirts with Jenova. 

Perhaps he could find a library and study something. He pokes at the thought and he's surprised to find he's seriously considering it despite the memory of cold, cold rows of cold, cold shelves filled with cold, cold lies. 

He was never educated with books and lunchbreaks and essays the way Angeal and Genesis were as children. After he joined SOLDIER there was no time for anything that wasn't to do with increasing his efficiency, and before that he'd been tutored, but in practical things. Things a living weapon should know. 

He contemplates devoting himself to something deliberately useless, like poetry, and thinks he might be smiling. Genesis would roll in his grave to know Sephiroth was studying poetry of all things. Perhaps he'll specialise in analysing LOVELESS. He still remembers every damned verse.

Genesis in his grave. Angeal, too. No Zack with Strife, so Zack's likely dead as well.

It's a fantasy, all of it. He'll never be able to bring himself to read LOVELESS.

He pulls his knees to his chest and does his best not to think about anything for a solid hour. Sephiroth suspects the Cetra eavesdrop on his thoughts and he'd rather not give them the satisfaction of watching him grieve traitors.

Then he waterproofs his pack, straps it securely to his back, and goes swimming, striking out from the coast and into the horizon. He might end up at Junon. He might wash ashore at the coast off Midgar. He might dry his clothes in the nameless stretch of grassland between them and live out his life as a hermit.

Sephiroth doesn't have anywhere he wants to go.


End file.
